Pearl Harbor Wasn’t the Only Attack that Week that Changed History

Matthew
Levey is professor of history at Birmingham-Southern College in
Birmingham, Alabama. His areas of interest and research are East
Asian history, World War II and World history.

While
most Americans remember the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as a
“date which will live in infamy,” we rarely think about the
attack in the global context of the rest of the war that engulfed the
globe till 1945.

For
four years already, Japan had been waging war in China, the primary
tension building between Japan and the Soviet Union for supremacy in
continental east Asia. The Soviets supplied much of the weaponry and
other forms of aid that helped Chiang Kai-shek in the early years of
Japan’s massive invasion of southern China in 1937.

But
it wasn’t just indirect involvement between the two nations. Japan
and the Soviet Red Army ultimately fought two major engagements in
the border regions between the eastern Soviet Union and
Japan-occupied Manchuria between September 1938 and August 1939. The
Soviets handily defeated the Japanese in both battles, convincing the
Japanese leadership to reconsider the Imperial Army’s plan for
northward expansion into the Soviet Union, and focus instead on
developing a vast colonial empire in the south Pacific and southeast
Asia, which could be achieved only by attacking the colonies of the
western powers in south and southeast Asia. Japan and the western
powers vied for control of the Pacific.

Not
only did they look elsewhere for conquest, but the Japanese even
formalized their armistice with the Soviet Union through a
non-aggression pact, one Adolf Hitler tried vehemently to convince
the Japanese to break so the Soviet Union would find itself in a two
front war, just as Germany did and the United States soon would find
itself fighting.

Just
days before Japan would attack Pearl Harbor, the last efforts by
Germany to overthrow Moscow and the Soviet Union would fall short,
thanks largely to the additional troops and manpower the Soviets
could move from the east that had previously been put in place to
thwart a potential Japanese invasion.

On
December 5, the Soviets launched a massive counterattack to drive
German forces away from Moscow. Only six days after suffering the
first real strategic failure of his war, Hitler would also declare
war on the United States on 11 December, thus ensuring America’s
involvement in the Allied war against the Axis powers.

Between
December 5-11, the war, which had previously been two distinct
regional wars, exploded into global war that would consume the planet
for another four years. World War two had two primary origins:
Japan’s war in China and the global potential it had by virtue of
Soviet involvement and the colonial presence of the western powers in
southeast Asia and the western Pacific; and Germany’s wars in
eastern and western Europe, the success of which Germany achieved in
the west gave Japan an even greater incentive to head south.

Yes,
the attack at Pearl Harbor is certainly a date which will live in
infamy as President Franklin Roosevelt so eloquently noted the
following day in his speech before Congress. But it’s also just one
event of several which simultaneously determined the direction of
global history.